Film Review: Jurassic Shark (2012)

SYNOPSIS:

When an oil company unwittingly unleashes a prehistoric shark from its icy prison, the Jurassic killer maroons a group of art thieves and a group of college students on an abandoned island

REVIEW:

Director – Brett Kelly
Starring – Emanuelle Carriere, Christine Emes, Celine Filion

Wow. And I don’t mean it in a good way. Obviously I love horror movies and I love all kinds of them, from the grade A Hollywood blockbuster to the grade B, C and D. Yep, I usually don’t even mind sitting through the real bad ones. It’s a horror film, after all.

When I first saw the title Jurassic Shark I was thinking something along the lines of those Saturday classics from the SyFy channel. Boy was I wrong. This movie doesn’t even come close to those. At the very least the creature feature movies on SyFy are unapologetically cheesy. Jurassic Shark isn’t even cheesy. Not even so bad it’s good. It’s just bad.

You get a pretty good idea of just how bad with the opening crawl of words that appear on the screen. How many of those have you seen with two, count them two, grammatical errors in the first paragraph. A missing parenthesis and a comma that should have been a period. Yikes. It only goes downhill from there.

In the above mentioned word crawl we find out that the megalodon was a giant shark that lived roughly from 28 to 1.5 million years ago. Okay, that’s cool. But the best part comes later in the movie when an injured scientist warns that they drilled too deep and unleashed a predator we haven’t seen for 200 million years. Well, that’s true. I mean, you also haven’t seen him for 50, 100, or even 300 million years, too. Kinda funny.

Drilled too deep, you ask? Yep. In true horror fashion you have a money hungry CEO that wants to drill for oil despite warnings that there is a real danger in drilling too deep. Seems there is a large ice pocket beneath the large freshwater lake and goodness knows what could be frozen in there.

Two bathing beauties are about to find out. After some painfully agonizing dialogue they decide to go for a swim. I’m guessing the shark got tired of listening to them as well because he thankfully puts them out of their misery. But not before the girls frolic in the water, playfully splashing one another. For a long time. Part of me wished they started talking again.

Next we get to see a badass gang dressed in black led by a badass lady named Barb. Actually that sounds a whole lot funnier than it is. They are on the run from the cops. Their crime? They stole a painting. All right, maybe they aren’t that tough, but they have a great escape plan. A water getaway that the cops will never expect. On a lake. With a rowboat. My god, I’m not making this stuff up.

Next comes our heroine, an aspiring journalist, with her group of college friends. She would love nothing more than to blow the lid off of this whole drilling operation and expose the company for all of their money-grubbing ways. Too bad our megalodon has other plans.

And if reading this leaves you shaking your head you should try watching the movie. Actually, I can’t really recommend it. Jurassic Shark could have been at the very least a cheesy creature feature to enjoy on a lazy Saturday afternoon but it falls short. In nearly every category.

To be fair, this was obviously a low budget feature. And I mean low budget. And that’s okay. Movies like these are not going to have the best special effects, the best actors, the best lighting. But there is one thing that, in independent films, comes free or pretty darn close. And that is the script. In all honesty, if the dialogue had been better this might not have been too bad. Then again, maybe not.

In the end I would avoid seeing Jurassic Shark. There just isn’t anything of value here. If you decide to watch this because you just have to watch every shark movie out there, consider yourself warned.

Jurassic Shark (2012)